Black Horn (29 page)

Finally,
he said, "If either Mrs Manners or Miss Lucy Kwok leave the Suite, you or
your deputy will be informed five minutes beforehand. Do you understand
why?"

The
Chinese smiled.

"I
think so. If I or my security staff spot either of the two ladies moving around
the hotel, or entering or leaving it, then we know that, unless we've been
pre-advised, there could be the possibility of impersonation."

The
Belgian nodded. He was also impressed.

"I'm
sure Mrs Manners will be both grateful and generous. Thank you for your
time."

After
he had ushered out the security manager, Rene sat down with Gloria and Lucy and
took them through the routine. They listened solemnly and then Gloria remarked,
"It sounds like we're living in a gilded prison."

"That's
exactly right, Mrs Manners," Rene said. "And this evening we'll be
joined by Jens Jensen and his computer. He tapped the tiny mobile phone in
front of him. "All of us have one of these and when the action starts, we
keep in touch that way. Please make no outgoing phone calls using the hotel
system. It's probably secure... but we can't be sure."

"When
will the action start?" Gloria asked.

"I'm
not sure," he replied. "But my gut feeling is that things will begin
to happen in the next forty-eight hours."

Gloria
asked. "Do you feel bad about being stuck here with us and not being in
the front-line?"

"Believe
me, Mrs Manners ... I am in the front line. So are both of you."

An
eagle would not have spotted it. The hide had been built by Maxie MacDonald,
and it blended into the countryside as cream into coffee. Tom Sawyer and Eric
Laparte were concealed inside. Tom held very powerful binoculars and Eric held
a notebook and a felt-tipped pen. The 14K villa and compound was situated about
a kilometre away below them. The hide was comfortable. They lay on sleeping
bags and they had a cooler beside them, containing soft drinks and foil-wrapped
sandwiches. They would be there for another three hours before Maxie and The
Owl replaced them.

The
surveillance had started two days earlier, and already the notebook was showing
a pattern. A black Mercedes was a frequent visitor, as was a truck containing
live fish and a pump pushing oxygen through the tank. Another refrigerated
truck also called frequently. Tommy Mo had at least fifty people inside that
compound; they all had to eat. There were other casual visitors, almost always
arriving in a Mercedes or a BMW, but there had been no pattern to their
movements.

Suddenly,
Tom Sawyer raised the binoculars and glanced at his watch. "Log it,"
he said. "The garbage truck is arriving."

The
Frenchman also glanced at his watch and made a note in the log-book. They
watched as the garbage truck pulled up in front of the massive metal gates. The
gates were opened and the truck went through. The two men were high enough to
see inside the compound and the routine was normal. The truck passed around to
the staff compound at the back, its rear lifted up, and three servants threw in
black garbage bags. Ten minutes later, the garbage truck emerged through the
gates and drove away towards Sai Kung village.

Eric
Laparte flicked through the pages of the log-book and said, "They're
efficient. Seven p.m. on both nights, give or take fifteen minutes."

Tom
Sawyer was studying the villa compound through his binoculars. He said,
"They make the mistake of routine. The supply trucks come at different
times during the day, but the garbage truck always comes at the same
time."

There
was no moon. Creasy and Guido were sitting on their haunches among the rocks,
looking out across the black sea. They had been squatting there for half an
hour without saying a word. Their friendship was of the kind that did not need
many words. In fact, the enveloping silence itself gave them comfort.

They
both saw it. The briefest flash of light from the sea. Guido reached down and
picked up the rubber-encased torch beside him, pointed it and pressed the
button twice.

Ten
minutes later, they were scrambling aboard the silenced black rubber dinghy
which had come in almost unseen. They were greeted without words, just a hand
on their shoulders, from the sole occupant.

Half an
hour later, they were sitting in the comfortable saloon of the MY Tempest, in
deep discussion with Tony Cope and Damon Broad. Creasy and Guido drank mineral
water. The two ex-Navy men were drinking pink gins and Creasy felt no need to
admonish them; the British Navy had won most of their battles half-drunk. They
all studied the chart on the table. It took about half an hour while Creasy
pointed out the location of the villa and the possible embarkation sites. He
then looked up at Tony Cope and said, "Brief me on the vessel."

Tony
Cope was a quintessential naval officer. Rank was everything. And since Creasy
was his superior, he gave him the deference required and his tone of voice was
respectful.

"The
Tempest is sixty-five feet over all, with a semi-planing hull. Twin
turbo-charged diesels, with a total horsepower of nine hundred. Top speed:
twenty-eight knots. Optimum speed: twenty-three. Normal range at optimum is
four hundred and fifty sea miles, but we've bolted on deck tanks, which double
that. We are provisioned for a dozen people for thirty days."

Creasy
glanced at Guido with a slight smile and then he himself assumed an officer's
tone. "You got the machinery?"

Tony
Cope nodded. "Yes. We cleared immigration and customs at fourteen hundred
hours yesterday. At sixteen hundred hours, the gentleman who calls himself
Corkscrew Two asked permission to come aboard. He gave the correct passwords. A
few minutes later, a truck arrived alongside with some cases of spare parts for
our engines. They had been correctly passed through customs. Inside those cases
were two heavy machine-guns. We took a small harbour cruise and Mr Corkscrew
Two assembled the weapons and bolted them to the deck, fore and aft. They are
now concealed by two upturned dinghys." He glanced at Damon Broad and for
the first time smiled and said, "That man is quite a character. When he
finished his work on the heavy MG's, he said, and I quote, "That's
it. In a couple of hours, I'm off home. Doesn't the Royal Navy have a tradition
of hospitality?" He then drank most of a bottle of Pusser's rum and
strolled down the gangplank as though he'd just had a glass of water."

"He's like that," Creasy said. "Never drinks on the job, but when he's
finished large bars have to restock their cellars."

The Police Commissioner was working late and, like every head of every police force
world-wide, he had a million problems. But his main problem, on this night, was
the 14K and his maverick Inspector Lau Ming Lan. There had been a message on
the Commissioner's Ansafone an hour and a half earlier, requesting a private
meeting at nine-thirty. The Commissioner had mixed feelings about Inspector Lau and the 14K.

There was a glint of unusual excitement in Inspector Lau's eyes as he walked in the
door. He sat down and said, "There are at least ten of them."

"Ten of who?"

"Creasy's little army."

"How do you know?"

The Inspector reached into his pocket and pulled out a small mobile phone,
measuring no more than three inches by two. He laid it on the Commissioner's
desk and said, "That's the latest model from Sony. It's being marketed by
Hong Kong Telecom."

The Commissioner picked it up, looked at it and said, "It's amazing... but
what about it?"

Inspector Lau pointed at it.

"I assumed that this man Creasy would need communication between his people. We
have excellent cellular communication in Hong Kong. I had the phone company
submit reports to me on every mobile phone rented or purchased in the last
seven days and by whom. The report showed that two days ago Mrs Gloria Manners
rented ten of those mobile phones through the Peninsula Hotel."

The Commissioner was impressed but he tried not to show it. He started to make a
speech about law and order, but Inspector Lau was talking on enthusiastically.

"And there's more. I twisted a few arms at Hong Kong Telecom, and so now I know the
frequencies used by those phones. I can listen in to every conversation -- I've
already started to do so. And there's another advantage. Because of our radio
listening beacons -- to try to combat the smuggling to China -- we're able to
pinpoint transmissions. The frequencies of the mobile phones of Creasy's team
have been programmed into our computer. Every call will be logged and the
computer will show the area from which it's made. We're already getting results."

"Like what?"

Inspector Lau pulled a page of a computer readout from his pocket, studied it and said,
"Of course, one location is the Peninsula Hotel. Incidentally, Mrs Manners
and the people with her are no longer making outside calls on the hotel
telephone system." He looked back at the paper. "Another location is
between Kadoorie Avenue and Braga Circuit, another comes from about two miles
off the coast of Sai Kung."

The
Commissioner raised his eyes.

"Yes,"
Inspector Lau confirmed, "they have a boat. It's a large and fast cabin
cruiser, called the MY Tempest. It arrived from Manila yesterday and cleared
immigration and customs routinely. It has a crew of two... both British. A
couple of hours after it arrived, spare parts were delivered on board in two
large cases."

The
Commissioner sighed theatrically, stood up and started to pace back and forth
across his spacious office. Then he made his speech. It was stern and to the
point and covered all legal and police principles.

Inspector
Lau listened with humility, his head bowed. He looked up when the Commissioner
had finished and said quietly, "I have discovered another location from
which one of those mobile phones is transmitting."

"Where?"

"Less
than one kilometre from Tommy Mo's villa in Sai Kung," he said. "At
this moment that villa is under observation."

The
Commissioner sighed and said, "Okay, proceed, but cautiously. And from now
on I don't want to hear or know anything more about it... Away with you."

At the
door, Inspector Lau turned and said apologetically, "There is one last
thing, Commissioner."

The
Commissioner was looking down at his desk. He looked up grimly.

"Are
you sure it's one last thing?"

"On
the sacred memory of my beloved grandmother, I make that promise."

"What
do you finally want?"

"I
have been trying to read Tommy Mo's mind and put myself in his place. The only
real thing he knows is that Gloria Manners and Lucy Kwok Ling Fong are in the
Presidential Suite of the Peninsula Hotel. For sure, he will not try to attack
them there. They will be perfectly protected. But he will try to get one or
both of them out."

"How?"

"I
have no idea, but knowing Tommy Mo's power and his cunning, he will certainly
try."

"So?"

"So,
there are four entrances to the Peninsula Hotel, including the service
entrance. I want twenty-four hour surveillance on all those entrances, starting
tonight."

The
Commissioner sighed yet again. "That means forty-two men on eight-hour
shifts, in two-man teams."

"Exactly."

The
Commissioner thought for about ten seconds and then said, "Five days and
that's all... Don't you realise how stretched we are when it comes to
manpower?"

"Yes,
Sir. But I want to choose those men myself and have them directly under my
command. Also, apart from the four normal unmarked police cars they would use,
I want an extra two, in case of emergency."

Again
the two Chinese looked at each other through thick spectacles. Then the
Commissioner turned to the console of his computer and started to punch
buttons. He said, "I'm sending a signal to the Heads of Personnel and
Transport, instructing them to be under your personal command for the next five
days."

"Thank
you, Sir."

"Is
he sure?"

Hung
Mun nodded.

"He's
a good man. We obtained a photograph of Lucy Kwok and circulated it around the
hotels to our people. One of them works at the Sheraton Hotel as a room boy. He
swears that he saw the woman in the corridor there last night. She went into
Room 54 and stayed about an hour."

Tommy
Mo nodded in satisfaction and said, "Naturally, you found out who was
occupying Room 54."

Hung
Mun answered, "The room is registered in the name of a Mr James Johnson
for one week, as of two days ago. But apparently he almost never uses the room.
I guess that he's staying somewhere else and just uses the place as a
love-nest."

Tommy
Mo smiled. "And that means that Lucy Kwok is his lover."

"We
must assume so."

"Let
us do that, Hung Mun, and let us assume that Lucy Kwok will visit him there
again. We must have one of the teams on hand. Arrange that we have rooms booked
on the same floor and our watchers covering every entrance."

Hung
Mun asked, "If she goes back there, do we break into the room and grab
them both?"

"No...
We must be more subtle. She must be taken as she comes out of the room and
before she reaches the street. It must be very quiet and with no fuss. I don't
want the police involved. Meanwhile, try to get a description of this man,
Johnson. He may be one of the men working for the Manners woman."

Hung
Mun stood up, bowed respectfully and left.

They
were gathered at the safehouse in Braga Circuit. It was the final strategy
meeting before the assault on Tommy Mo's villa the next day.

They
sat around the large oval dining room table. On the wall, in front of Creasy,
was an enlarged ordnance map of the Sai Kung peninsula, showing every building,
road and track and the contours of every hill and valley. Various arrows,
crosses and circles had been superimposed with felt-tipped pens in a variety of
colours. Beside the map was a diagram of the villa and its surrounding
compound. Creasy was flicking through the pages of a notebook, the surveillance
log of the various watchers over the past few days.